The Power of an Electric One-Liner: 5 Tips to Make it Pop
By Marissa Ronca
Last week, I spoke to a friend relocating to L.A. after losing his job. In detailing the challenges of finding work in a pandemic, he also summed up his unique value as a potential employee: “I was a talent manager for New York comedians before I became a development executive, so I leverage those valuable connections to build popular and profitable shows around them.”
Boom. That’s a great electric one-liner (EOL). In a world fried and frayed and overloaded with data, there’s more reason than ever to embrace the power of a strong, simple statement. It’s Occam’s razor for real life — the simplest explanation is usually the best one.
Creating an effective EOL is an exercise in making every word count. It’s the ultimate distillation of an idea, boiled down into something conversational and catchy. I did not invent this phrase and don’t know who did — thanks for all the electricity puns, Google — but it’s a common term in content development.
As an entertainment executive, my team and I wrote an EOL for every show we had in production. Not to be confused with a tagline, which is a marketing tool and meant to be public-facing, the EOL was for internal use only. Brief as it was, it served a crucial business function. It allowed us to simply communicate the concept of a show to our colleagues and senior leadership. These groups didn’t want or need all the details of the creative vision behind a project. They just needed a simple, memorable way to sell and share the pitch. To paraphrase Chip and Dan Heath, authors of New York Times bestseller Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, it had to be “sticky.”
EOLs can be applied in any industry. Done right, they accelerate workflow by allowing all stakeholders to be fluent in the same clear and concise language. Think of an EOL as your pitch’s best friend.
Whether personal or professional, EOLs can be hard to write if you’re too close to a project. I recently joined Chief, a network for women leaders, and was asked to write my own mini bio. I struggled with encapsulating my whole self and career in just 280 characters. Ultimately, I got there by drafting a few options and asking a friend to weigh in. It was an unexpectedly uncomfortable process. But now I’m more clear on my hybrid identity as a creative leader, booklover, boy mom, binge-watcher, and ski bum at heart.
From this practice and working with hundreds of TV pitches, here’s what I’ve learned about mastering the craft of electric one-liners.
Be concise (obviously!): An EOL cannot capture everything about a person or project, but it paves the way forward by virtue of being tight, intriguing, and ideally, clever. When describing his show Adam Ruins Everything — a series that debunked and fact-checked cultural assumptions about everything from engagement rings to death — Adam Conover always said, “It’s about everything you didn’t want to need to know.”
Get the Tone Right: “From the creators of Super Troopers comes a show about firemen in the wettest city in America.” Steve Lemme and Kevin Heffernan pitched their show Tacoma FD with this simple and hilarious premise. It told me what to expect (laughs) and what not to expect (fires).
Be honest: Make it catchy, but don’t oversell or mislead just to get the greenlight. The resulting product must deliver on its promise.
Ask for help: Those too close to a project often have trouble creating the EOL — myself included (see my Chief story above). Don’t be afraid to ask someone at a distance to weigh in.
Bring a spirit of play: An EOL isn’t set in stone. Feel free to experiment. It can evolve or be adapted for different mediums. Who you are on LinkedIn might be nothing like your Bumble persona (let’s hope not).
With an EOL, you empower everyone in your company to evangelize for your project at every stage. Like uncorking a Champagne bottle to punctuate an occasion, it brings the room together. Make it pop!
